So the fine folks at TheSnugg.com emailed me and asked me if I’d like to review one of their iPad Mini cases. I said yes; they sent me a fetching one of these – the iPad mini Retina Leather Case – and I wore it around on my iPad for a week. If you’re the sort of person who wants to wear a case on your iPad, the Snugg cases are pretty great.

Tiny Robot is Disappointed by Wall Street, a photo by Shiny Things on Flickr.
Jeez, it’s been quiet around here lately, hasn’t it?
Here’s some Tiny Robot for you, to break the monotony. Tiny Robot heard about a place called Wall Street, deep in Bryce Canyon National Park. This Wall Street is a deep slot canyon between two huge sandstone massifs… but there’s nobody there to help Tiny Robot with the IPO of Tiny Robot Industries.

So despite having been away from Disneyland-with-the-death-penalty for more than a year, I can’t resist keeping up with the news from Singapore’s spectacularly dodgy S-chip stocks - the Chinese small-caps that infest the lower reaches of the SGX because it’s the only exchange that will take their listing fees. And one of them - an abalone-farming firm named Oceanus Group - dropped an absolute humdinger of an announcement a few days ago.

An eagle-eyed colleague recently pointed me to the case of CLS Bank v Alice, where Alice Corporation is trying to enforce a set of patents against CLS Bank, the little-known (but systematically vital) central settlement point for interbank FX trades. The judgment itself is interesting because it tries to rule on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions (that is, business methods implemented “on a computer” instead of “in real life”). Alice’s patents specifically refer to computer-based implementations of certain processes, rather than the processes themselves, and the Federal Court was asked to rule whether the computer-based implementation might be patentable even when the business process itself isn’t.

In 2010, a Florida man parted with 10,000 units of a new-fangled anarcho-currency thing called “bitcoins” in return for two hot, fresh, tasty pizzas. At the time, that was about $40 worth of these “buttcoins” (NSFW), so that was already quite an expensive pizza. (Must’ve been a pretty serious case of the munchies.) Three years later, and Bitcoin has boomed, busted, and boomed again. It’s been used by Cypriots, Iranians, dope fiends, and people who just want to buy a pizza without Big Brother knowing whether or not they like anchovies.